Alain Desrosières’s reflexive numbers

Abstract

I am not going to offer a technical analysis of one or other of his published works, which others represented in the present volume will do much better than I can, particularly in respect of his contribution to statistics and the history of statistics and their uses. However, I would like to say, in a few words, what in my view was the meaning of his work, what made it of crucial importance to sociology and the social sciences in general. To do this, I will try to place his work in the context of its time, a long period of more than 40 years, from the end of the 1960s to the 2000s. And to place Desrosière’s work in the context of its time is to connect it with both the intellectual and political debates of that time and their evolution.